Panic Broom

by Sara Bourgeois

  I flipped through their wedding album but put that box away quickly. They looked happy in all the photos, so I knew that the answers weren’t there.

  “These are family photos,” Annika said as she pulled a handful of pictures out of a box. “Why would these be in the boxes?”

  I thumbed through the photos. “Well, all of these have Henry in them,” I said.

  “Yeah, but they have other family in them too. These are of picnics, holidays, and just other candid family shots. They’re important family moments, but she stuffed them in a box like they don’t matter because Henry is in them,” Annika said.

  “Maybe she was just really sad about his death,” I said. “That’s why she hid the photos. It was too painful.”

  “You guys are really bad at this.”

  We all turned to see Margery’s ghost standing in the closet doorway. She was only halfway manifested, and I had to wonder if it had something to do with the spell that was keeping us in. Or I thought it was possible the thread that kept her tethered to our world was fraying. The goddess didn’t want her on earth.

  Were we running out of time?

  Chapter Eight

  Margery couldn’t say much more before she disappeared. What she did say was that we were right about the trap. She hadn’t set it.

  That meant that someone else who had access to her home had placed the bags. But we had to figure out who that could be.

  “I think we need to get out of here,” I said. “I want to go check on Brody, and we’re not going to solve this murder from in here. I think the witches are going to keep the zombies in town under control, and we need to tell them about the ones in the tunnel.”

  “You’re right,” Remy said. “Let’s go down to the front door and undo the spell. If we have to, we can make a break for it.”

  “We probably won’t have to make a break for it. Remember, that group of aunties went through before we came in here,” Annika said.

  “Well, let’s be ready anyway,” Remy replied.

  I got the baggie that Meri had put back together and we all went downstairs to wait by the front door. The plan was to dump it out and then swing the door open so we could see what was going on.

  What was going on was nothing. The street was so quiet that it was as if I had cotton stuffed in my ears. The witches were gone. The zombies were gone. If I hadn’t known how many were downstairs probably moving into the basement from the tunnel at that exact moment, I could have imagined it was over.

  As we moved down to the car, Remy called Amelda and told her about the horde in the tunnels under Margery’s house. His grandmother said that she and the largest group of witches would go there now and handle them.

  With that situation under control, we decided to go back to Hangman’s House for the time being. I didn’t watch much television, but Annika insisted that we turn on the news and see what was going in the rest of the world. I didn’t think that was a great idea, but I agreed anyway. After all, I still had family out there. I even wondered if Donnie and his new family were okay, but I resisted the urge to call him.

  Thorn was out there too. His family was back in the city, and if the necromantic magic had spread that far, they were probably in danger. I felt a pang of something in my stomach at the thought of them dying. But I didn’t know what I could do.

  Annika told me that once he moved away from Coventry, he would forget the magic he’d come to embrace. The spell that made all of the other humans willfully ignore witchcraft would work on him again once he was away from the ley lines and away from me.

  “They’ll be all right,” Remy said and took my hand.

  “You were reading my thoughts again,” I said, but I squeezed his hand back.

  “I wasn’t. They just kind of drifted over here to me,” he said and kissed my temple. “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry. I’m just sorry that I’m sitting here worrying about him.”

  “Brighton, you don’t need to apologize for that. You’re the kind of person who worries about the people you care about. It’s why I love you. If you weren’t concerned for Thorn and his family, you wouldn’t be you.”

  “Any luck on getting ahold of Brody?” I asked Annika hopefully.

  “He’s at the library still. The family has given him temporary access to the Dark Arts section of the paranormal collection. He offered to come back here to be with us, but I told him to stay.”

  “I take it he hasn’t found anything that can help us,” I said.

  “No, not yet.”

  “We need to solve this ourselves,” I said. “The world is depending on us.”

  It was true. The news was filled with stories from all over the country about the dead rising and turning the living. People were dying because they thought the whole thing was a joke. They kept going shopping or to work even after being warned.

  The whole thing was going to be a nightmare to contain, and we had to find Margery’s killer before the living who’d been turned were too far gone. I still held onto hope that we could change them back and erase their memories. Life had to go back to normal after this. If there was even a chance of that happening, I thought we owed it to the world.

  I was about to suggest we go to the lawyer who’d drawn up the divorce papers when we heard a noise upstairs. It was the distinct thud of something heavy falling over and then a shuffling sound. That was followed by a moan.

  “What are we doing?” Remy asked. “We didn’t check the house for zombies when we got here. Why didn’t we check?”

  “I don’t know,” Annika said. “I guess I just assumed that since everything looked all right, there weren’t any.”

  “Yeah, all those zombies in the tunnels came from inside my house, right?” I asked. “But this place looked perfectly fine when we got here. I guess I just assumed that was the house taking care of us.”

  “That part could be true,” Remy said. “That might be why this place isn’t trashed, but we still should have checked.”

  Just then Meri jumped down off his perch on the back of the couch and hissed. Another cat, one that looked almost just like Meri, ran down the steps and sprinted across the living room to one of the holes in the wall that lead to Meri’s wall tunnels.

  “Meri, wait,” I said as he began to take off after the cat.

  “I can’t wait. If I hesitate, I’ll miss him,” he said and shot off into the wall after the other cat.

  “What was that about?” Annika asked. “That looked like Meri except he was slightly lighter. Like instead of black, he was a really, really dark gray.”

  “There was that other cat that was like an evil version of Meri, but he was identical.”

  “How can there be an evil version of Meri?” Annika asked. “That still blows my mind.”

  “I have no idea, and he won’t talk about it,” I said with a shrug.

  “So do we wait for him? Or what’s going on?” Remy asked.

  “Well, right before we were so rudely interrupted by dark gray evil Meri, I was going to suggest we go to the office of the lawyer that Henry used to file the divorce papers,” I said.

  “He’s not going to talk to us,” Remy said.

  “If he’s even there,” Annika said, and then the lightbulb went off. “Oh, we’re not going there to talk to him.” She did a little hop and clapped her hands together gleefully. “We’re going to do some breaking and entering.”

  “It’s a zombie apocalypse,” I said. “I feel like it’s totally justified.”

  What I hadn’t known was that the lawyer and the town’s funeral home director were brothers. So the lawyer’s office was in the same building as the Coventry Eternal Rest Funeral Parlor.

  It was a small town, so people didn’t die a lot in Coventry. That meant that there weren’t any… residents in the parlor to come back to life. I’d also worried that the lawyer and his brother might have lived there, but the house was empty.

  We looked around for living people an
d zombies and figured out the layout of the building. The first floor was a grand entryway when you stepped inside with a door off to one side that led to a staircase to the second floor.

  The three of us hadn’t come in through the front door, so we had to walk through the funeral viewing area to get there. It was a little chapel-type area just like you see in the movies with rows of chairs and a casket at the head of the room. The casket was blessedly empty and probably just there for show.

  There was also another door across from the one that led to the staircase. I didn’t really need to know what was in the room, but I poked my head in just to check anyway. If nothing else, I told myself that at least I’d know there were no zombies inside. That room was a casket showroom full of different types of caskets and a book of prices sitting on a desk.

  Since we all figured that it was more likely that the lawyer’s office was upstairs rather than in the basement, we headed up there. The whole time, I kept expecting to get caught, but there was no one around up there either.

  In addition to the lawyer’s office, there was a kitchen and a file storage room. The file storage room was the thing I was most interested in. We all went in and found the file for Margery’s divorce. The interesting thing was how many files had the last name Skeenbauer on them. It didn’t hit me until that moment just how much of Coventry was Skeenbauer witches. It was like one big family and then the rest of us.

  “Should we really be doing this?” I asked before I opened the file.

  “This was your idea,” Annika said. “But if you don’t want to look, I will.”

  “We’re doing what we have to do to save the world,” Remy said.

  “You’re right,” I said.

  I opened the file and thumbed through the paperwork while Annika and Remy watched. In the file were documents from Margery’s attorney. So the divorce had been serious enough that they’d both gotten attorneys.

  The response from Margery’s attorney alleged that Henry was having an affair despite the fact that he’d filed for divorce. I went through the entire file twice, and I couldn’t find the name of the person Margery thought Henry was having the affair with. He, of course, maintained that he was not cheating.

  At some point, the whole thing was withdrawn, and the case closed. Infuriatingly there was no name to go with the affair allegations. From what I could gather from the paperwork, it boiled down to Margery having a lot of suspicions and no evidence to back it up.

  Of course, as a witch, I knew she probably had more than suspicion. It was just that whatever evidence she had wasn’t something she could put in court documents.

  So did she not know who he was cheating with? If she knew, you’d have thought she’d have told us. Obviously, whoever her husband was cheating with would be the number one suspect in the murder. Right? But if he was dead, then why would his lover kill his wife? That was something I had to figure out.

  “What is it?” Annika finally asked when I’d been silently reading for a while.

  I handed her the file. “It looks like Henry was cheating on Margery. At least, at some point in their marriage, Margery really believed he was cheating,” I said.

  “But they reconciled,” Remy said.

  “Maybe he wasn’t really cheating,” Annika offered. “Perhaps Margery was wrong.”

  “But he filed for divorce,” I said.

  “Perhaps she was driving him nuts accusing him of cheating and finally stopped,” Annika said.

  “We should ask her ourselves,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she’s hovering around, right? So if she doesn’t appear upon request, then we’ll summon her,” I said.

  “That’s never really gone well,” Remy interjected.

  “It hasn’t,” I said. “We’ll get it right this time. We’ll use the power of three and we’ve got Meri too. If she wants us to solve her murder, then she needs to help.”

  Chapter Nine

  We decided to do the séance at the place where we’d found her body. Margery’s tie to earth would be strongest where her life extinguished. That was what we hoped, anyway.

  After putting the file back, we left the funeral home/lawyer’s office and drove back to my place. There we loaded up on all the supplies we needed to conduct a séance in the safest way possible.

  Before we began, I had to smoke some more of the mullein. I kinda laughed a little when I was done realizing that I was smoking it to get rid of the munchies instead of getting the munchies from smoking it. If you could call the ravenous, overwhelming hunger I experienced the munchies.

  The area where we’d found her body had been cleared out, and the energy felt much better. It wasn’t entirely cleansed of the evil that had taken place there. Mother Earth remembered things like that, but at least it wasn’t bad enough to make you feel like you were about to die.

  “I don’t suppose you could just make an appearance,” Remy said once we’d chosen a spot. “Aunt Margery, you could save us a lot of trouble.”

  Nothing.

  She obviously wasn’t interested in saving us any trouble, or her tether to the earth was so tenuous at that point she really couldn’t hear us anymore. So we drew the circle and set up for the séance. We sat inside cross-legged and positioned ourselves so that our knees and legs formed somewhat of a triangle. Meri stayed in the center.

  Once we began, the air around us cracked and hummed. You could feel the malevolent spirits and demons that were just waiting for a crack in the veil scratching and clawing trying to get through, but there was so much protective magic being used in Coventry at that moment that they had no hope of crossing over. I was a little terrified, but it was actually probably one of the safest times to do a séance.

  We all joined hands and called out to Margery’s spirit while Meri did his best to both thin the veil and make sure that no super powerful entities got through. As far as I could tell, none even tried. It was a little bizarre considering how my former conjurings had gone, but it did give me an idea of how powerful the Skeenbauer coven was when they came together for a cause.

  It took us a while, but we eventually got a line of Margery’s spirit. She hadn’t been ignoring us, her spirit was being dragged to somewhere dark because of the things she had done. We were, in a way, giving her another chance by dragging her back.

  Witches knew that no one was judged and assigned to either a good place or bad. Heaven and hell, if you want to call them that, were a choice. Spirits went where they belonged. You’d think that no one would want to go to hell, but sometimes people played around in the darkness for so long that it corrupted them to their core.

  I was beginning to believe that Margery was corrupted by her jealousy. I didn’t know for sure if her husband had cheated on her or not, but she believed he had, and she’d let that bitterness take root in her. Otherwise, how could someone so powerful end up the way she had? There was no reason for it.

  Margery had a good, loving family. She was beautiful. My guess was that she could have had any man she wanted, but she couldn’t get over a betrayal.

  So we pulled her back. When Margery appeared in front of us, she looked different than the spirit we’d seen before. She was broken, and while I couldn’t see any burns on her, I could tell the fires of hell had scorched her nonetheless.

  Her eyes had lost their smug happiness. We could barely hold onto her. After all the death and misery she’d caused, the demons wanted her bad.

  “I shouldn’t have done what I did,” she whispered, and our hold on her got a little stronger.

  “We can still make this right,” I said to her.

  “We can’t,” Margery responded. “What I’ve done, there’s no way to undo it. Not all of anyway. People have suffered. The world is suffering because I couldn’t let go.”

  “I’m sure we can find a way to fix most of it, but you have to release your magic,” I said.

  Margery started to speak, but Remy got to it first. “She can’t,”
he said softly. “The witch’s contract is our only hope. It’s out of her hands either way.”

  “Then you have to help us as much as you can,” I said. “You can help us solve your murder and that will release the contract. It will end your dark magic, and it will help the people you’ve hurt.”

  All I could do was hope I could get through to her, but she looked completely and utterly despondent. Margery flickered again as the tether we’d created weakened. The forces fighting us for her were pulling no punches.

  “My sister Mirabella was always jealous of me. Even when we were little and I tried to be nice to her, she always seemed to dislike me. As we got older, it became a huge competition. She did everything she could to become a more powerful witch, and to make me look bad. That included stealing my high school boyfriend. So, naturally, when I started to suspect that Henry was having an affair, I thought it was her. I accused her. I accused them both, but I could never prove it. Neither of them would ever admit to it either,” Margery said.

  “You think she killed you?” I asked. “Why? Why would she do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Margery said, and there was a hint of sadness to her voice. “You’d have thought that if they were involved, she’d be happy that I was bringing him back. But maybe her pride got in the way. Perhaps the thought of me pulling off a feat like bringing someone back from the dead was more than she could bear.”

  “Take a look at this,” Remy said and he tried to show Margery the picture of the athame that was used to kill her. “Was this Mirabella’s?”

  “It was. Oh, goddess. She did do it. She actually killed me.” And with that, Margery disappeared.

  “So that’s it, right?” Annika was the first to speak. “We solved the murder and that lifts the dark magic.”

  “It should be,” Remy answered.

  But somehow, it didn’t feel over. I thought that perhaps that was just because we hadn’t gone back into town to see it for ourselves. I thought the air would feel different when the necromantic curse was lifted, but perhaps that wasn’t accurate.